IMBIE team presents Greenland and Antarctica ice losses


13 March, 2020

On March 12th, the IMBIE team has published in Nature an article showing that, of the total sea level rise, 10.6 millimetres (60%) was due to Greenland ice losses.

The article Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018, co-authored by by two isardSAT staff, comes after a companion article published in June 2018 and demonstrates that Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990’s and are both tracking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst-case climate warming scenario.

This paper has been widely reported in media around the world. Gorka Moyano declared to the Spanish international news agency EFE that “Thanks to Earth Observation satellites we can measure the ice loss at a global scale for a relevant period of time - 30 years. This cannot be achieved by other means”. And Mark Pattle explained in El País that “Both Greenland and Antarctica have been consistently losing ice since 1992. In Greenland, we’ve seen a sharp increase of loss in 2002-2007 compared to the preceding years, and reaching its peak rate of loss in 2007-2012. For Antarctica, more than half the ice loss we’ve measured has happened since 2012.”

Read BBC article here.

Read NBC News article here